The Luxe
by Sterek123
Summary: Katherine and Bonnie Bennett rule Mystic Falls' social scene. but when the girls discover their family's status is far from secure, suddenly everyone is a threat to their golden future. Set in 1864, based on the book The Luxe by Anna Godberson. R&R
1. Chapter 1

**The Luxe**

**Disclaimer: **This is a retelling of the story of The Luxe by Anna Gobberson, using the characters and locations of Vampire Diaries, that belongs to L.J Smith. In other words; I own NOTHING.

**Prologue: **

_On the morning of October 4__th__, 1864, Katherine Petrova Bennett –the eldest daughter of the late Mr. Grayson Bennett- passed into the kingdom of heaven. Services will be held tomorrow, at 10 o'clock am at Fells' Church._

_The Daily Gazette_

In life, Katherine Petrova Bennett was known not only for her loveliness but also for her moral character, so it was fair to assume that in the afterlife she would occupy a lofty seat with an especially good view. If Katherine had looked down from the heavenly perch one particular October morning on the proceeding of her own funeral she would have been honored to see that all of Mystic Falls' best families had turned up to say good-bye.

They crowded Broadway with their black carriages proceeding toward the corner of East Tenth Street, where the Fell's Church stood. Even though there was currently no sun or rain their servants sheltered them with great black umbrellas, hiding their faces –etched with shock and sadness- from the public's peering eyes. Katherine would have approved of their somberness and also of their indifferent attitude of the curious workday people pressed up to the police barricades. The crowds had come to wonder at the passing of the perfect eighteen-year-old whose glittering evenings had been recounted in the morning papers to brighten their days.

A cold snap had greeted all of Mystic Falls that morning, rendering the sky above an unfathomable gray. Reverend Needlehouse murmured as his carriage pulled up to the church, as if God could no longer imagine beauty now that Katherine Bennett no longer walked his Earth. The pallbearers nodded in agreement as they followed the reverend onto the street and into the shadow of the gothic-style church.

They were Katherine's peers, the young men she danced with at countless balls. They had disappeared to St. Paul's and Exeter at some point then returned with adult ideas and a fierce will to flirt. And here they were now, in black frock coats and mourning bands, looking gave for perhaps the first time ever.

First, was Klaus Cutting, who was known for being so lighthearted and who had proposed marriage to Katherine twice without anyone taking him seriously. He looked as elegant as always, although Kat would have noticed the fair stubble on his chin –a telltale sign of deep sorrow- as Klaus shaved every morning and was never seen in public without a smooth face. After him, came the dashing James Hyde, who had just that May inherited a majority share of the Equitable Life Insurance Society. He'd once let his face linger near Katherine's strawberry-scented neck and told her that she smelled better than any woman in Mystic Falls. After James, came Brody Parker Fish, whose family's townhouse neighbored the Bennetts' on Grammery Park, and Fredrick Armstrong and Amos Vreewold, who had often competed to be Katherine's partner on the dance floor.

They stood still with downcast eyes, waiting for Damon Salvatore, who emerged last. The refined mourners could not help a little gasp of the sight of him, and not only because he was usually so wickedly bright-eyed and so regularly with a drink in hand. The tragic irony of Damon appearing as a pallbearer on the very day when he was to have wed Katherine seemed deeply unfair.

The horses drawing the hearse were shiny black, but the coffin was decorated with an enormous white satin bow, for Katherine had died a virgin. What a shame, they all whispered, blowing ghostly gusts of air into one another's ears, that an early death was visited on such a very _good_ girl.

Damon, his thin lips set in a hard line, moved towards the hearse with the other pallbearers close behind. They lifted the unusually light coffin and stepped towards the church door. A few audible sobs were muffled into handkerchiefs as all of Mystic Falls realized they would never again look on Kat's beauty, on her porcelain skin, or sincere smile. There was, in fact, no Kat, for her body had not yet been recovered from the Hudson River, despite two days of dragging it, and despite the handsome reward offered Mayor Lockwood.

The whole ceremony had come on rather quickly, in fact although everyone seemed too shocked too shocked to consider this.

Next in the funeral cortege was Katherine's mother wearing a dress and a veil in her favorite color. Mrs. Grayson Bennett, nee Margret Peirce, had always seemed fearsome and remote –even to her own children- and she only became harder and more intractable since her husband's passing last winter. Grayson Bennett had been odd and his oddness had only grown in the years before his death. He had however, been the eldest son of an eldest son of a Bennett –a family that has been prospered on the little town of Mystic Falls since the beginning – and so society had always forgiven him of his quirks. But in the weeks before her own death, Katherine had noticed something new and pitiable in her mother, as well as Margret leaned a little to her left now, as though remembering her late husband's presence.

In her footsteps was Katherine's Aunt Lucy, the younger sister of her late father. Lucy Bennett was one of the first women to move prominently in society after a divorce; it was understood, though not very much discussed, that her early marriage to a titled Spaniard had exposed her to enough bad humor and drunken debauchery for a whole lifetime. She went by her maiden name now and looked as aggrieved by the loss of her niece as if Katherine had been her own child.

There followed an odd gap, which everyone was too polite to comment on, and then came Agnes Jones, who was sniffling loudly.

Agnes was not a tall girl, and though she appeared well dressed enough to the mourners still pressing up against the police line for a better look, the black dress she wore would have been sadly familiar to the deceased. Katherine had worn the dress only once –to her father's funeral- and then passed it down. It had since been let out at the waist and shortened at the hem. As Katherine knew too well, Agnes' father had met with financial ruin when she was only eleven and had subsequently thrown himself off a bridge. Agnes liked to tell people that Katherine was the only person who had offered her friendship in those dark times. Katherine had been her _best_ friend, Agnes had often said and though Katherine would have been embarrassed by such exaggerated statements, she wouldn't have dreamed of correcting the poor girl.

After Agnes came Elena Gilbert, who was usually said to be Katherine's _true_ best friend. Katherine would indeed have recognized the distance look of impatience she wore now. Elena never like waiting, especially outdoors. One of the lesser, Mrs. Vanderbilt standing nearby recognized the look as well, and made a virtually inaudible cluck. Elena, with her gleaming black feathers, Egyptian profile and wide heavily lashed eyes, was much admired but not very generally trusted.

And there was the fact –uncomfortable to all assembled- that Elena had been with Katherine when her body disappeared into the cold waters of the Hudson. She had, everyone knew by now, been the last person to see Katherine alive. Not that they suspected her of anything, of course. But then, she did not look nearly as haunted enough. She wore a cluster of diamonds at her throat and on her arm, the formidable Jeremy Buck.

Jeremy was a distance relation of the old Buck clan –so distant that lineage could not be proved or disproved- but he was still formidable in size, two heads taller than Elena and robust in the middle. Katherine had never cared for him; she had always harbored a secret preference for doing what was practical and right over what was clever and fine. Jeremy had never seemed to like her like anything more than a taste manger, and indeed the gold cap now on his left canine matched the watch chain that extended from under his coat to his pants pocket. If that lesser, Mrs. Vanderbilt had said aloud what she was thinking –that he appeared more flashy than aggrieved- he most likely would take that as a compliment.

Once Elena and Jeremy passed, the rest of the crowd followed them into the church, flooding the aisles with their black garbs on the way to their familiar pews. Reverend Needlehouse stood quietly at the pulpit as the best families of Mystic Falls –The Salvatore's and The Gilbert's, the Lockwood's and Cuttings- took their seats. Those who could no longer stop themselves, even after that lofty ceiling began to whisper about the shocking absence.

Finally, Mrs. Bennett gave the reverend a brusque nod.

"It is with heavy hearts," Reverend Needlehouse began. It was all he managed to say before the arched door to the church went flying. The ladies of Mystic Falls' polite class itched to turn around and look, but of course decorum forbade it. They kept their elaborately coiffured heads facing forward and their eyes on Reverend Needlehouse, whose expression was not making that effort any easier.

Hurrying down the aisle was Bonnie Bennett, the dearly departed's little sister, with a few shining curls coming loose from under her hat and her cheeks pink from exertion. Only Katherine, if indeed she could look down from the heavens would have known what to make of the smile disappearing from Katherine's face as she took a seat in the first pew.

**A/N: There you go! As I said before, this is a retelling of the story The Luxe by Anna Gobberson but using the characters and locations of Vampire Diaries.**

**I would also like to point out a few things:**

**Bonnie and Katherine are sisters, even though one's white and the others black the mom is white and the dad is black.**

**There is NO slavery in this story, the sevents are both black and white and they're all poor.**

**So, tell me what you think! Stefan and Caroline are coming soon.**


	2. Chapter 2

**Disclaimer: **This is a retelling of the story of The Luxe by Anna Gobberson, using the characters and locations of Vampire Diaries, that belongs to L.J Smith. In other words; I own NOTHING.

**Chapter 1:**

_THE JONOTHAN GILBERT FAMILY_

_REQUEST THE PLEASURE OF YOUR COMPANY_

_AT A BALL IN HONOR OF THE ARCHIETECT_

_WEBSTER YOUNGHAM_

_ON THE EVENING OF SATURDAY_

_THE SIXTEENTH OF SEBTEMBER_

_IN THE CITY OF MYSTIC FALLS_

_COSTUMES ARE REQUIRED_

"They have all been looking for you," Said Margret Bennett to Katherine, quietly but firmly.

Katherine had spent eighteen years being groomed as her mother's prized asset and had become, among other things, an expert interpreter of her tones. This one meant Katherine was to return to the main ballroom and dance with a partner of her mother's choosing at once, most likely a young man of enviable, if slightly inbred lineage. Katherine smiled apologetically at the girls she had been sitting with –Annemarie Albert and Eva Barbey, whom she had met that spring in France and who were both dressed as courtesans from the Luis VIX era. Katherine had just been telling them how very far Paris seemed to her now, though she had only stepped off the Transatlantic Steamer and back onto Mystic Falls soil early that morning. Her old friend Agnes Jones had been perched on the Ivory-and-Gold striped damask love seat as well, but Katherine's younger sister, Bonnie, was nowhere to be seen. Most likely because she suspected that her behavior was being monitored, which of course it was. Katherine's irritation at the persistent childishness of her younger sister flared up, but she quickly banished the feeling.

After all, Bonnie hadn't enjoyed the formal collision that Katherine had two years ago, just after her sixteenth birthday. For the elder Bennett sister that had been a year with a former governess –she and Elena Gilbert had shared her along with various tutors- and lessons in comportment, dance and the modern languages. Bonnie had turned sixteen last April with no fanfare during Katherine's time abroad. The family had still been mourning for their father, and a big to do had not seemed appropriate. She had simply started attending balls with Aunt Lucy in Saratoga during her summer there, so she could hardly be held responsible for seeming a little rough.

"I'm sure you are sorry to leave your friends," Mrs. Bennett said, steering her daughter from the feminine hush of the parlor and into the main ballroom. Katherine, in her shepardess's costume, of white brocade, looked especially bright, and especially tall next to her mother, who was still wearing her widow's black. Grayson Bennett passed away at the beginning of the year and her mother would be in formal mourning for another year at least. "But you seem to be the young lady most in demand for waltzes tonight."

Katherine had a heart shaped face, with delicate features and an alabaster complexion. As a boy who would not enter the Jonathan Gilberts' ballroom that evening once told her, that she a mouth the size and shape of a plum. She tried to make that mouth smile appreciatively now, even though she was concerned by her mother's tone. There was a new unsettling urgency in Mrs. Bennett's famously steely presence that Katherine had noticed almost as soon as she departed from the great ship. She had been gone since her father's burial nine months ago, and had spent all of spring and summer learning wit in the salons and how to dress on Rue De La Paix and allowing herself to be distracted from her grief.

"I've already danced so many dances tonight," Katherine offered her mother.

"Perhaps," she replied, "But you know how very happy it would make me if one of your partners were to propose to you."

Katherine tried to laugh to disguise the despair the comment raised her. "Well, you are lucky I'm still so young, and we have years before I even have to begin picking one of them."

"Oh, no." Mrs. Bennett's eyes darted around the main ballroom. It was dizzying, with its frosted glass ceiling, frescoed walls and gilt mirrors situated as it was at the center of a warren of smaller but equally busy and decadent rooms. Great potted palm trees were set up in a ring close to the walls, shielding the ladies at the room's edge from the frantic dancers gliding across the tessellated marble floor. There appeared to be four servants to every guest, which seemed ostentatious even to a girl who had spent the last two seasons learning to be a lady in the City of Light. "The one thing we do not have is time." Mrs. Bennett finished.

Katherine felt a nerve tingle up her spine and before she could prod her mother about what _that_ meant, they were at the perimeter of the ballroom, close to where the lavishly outfitted couples gliding across the dance floor.

They were the Bennetts' peers, only seventy or so families, only 400 or so souls dancing as though there would no tomorrow. And indeed, tomorrow would probably pass them by while under their silken canopies, waking only to accept pitchers of ice water and shoo away the maid. There would be church, of course, but after an evening so glittering and epic, the worshipers would surely be few and be entertained, punctuated occasionally by the reinvested of their vast fortunes in new and even more lucrative prospects.

"The last man to ask for you was Percival Coddington." Mrs. Bennett told Katherine as she positioned her daughter next to a gigantic rose-colored column. There were several such columns in the room and Katherine felt sure that they were meant to impress. "Mr. Coddington inherited his father's entire estate" he mother went on. "As you well know."

Katherine sighed. The warm thought of the one boy she knew would not be at the Gilberts' costume ball that evening could not have made the looming prospect of Percival Coddington any less appealing. She had known Percival since they were children, when he was the kind of boy who avoided human contact in intentionally harming small animals. He had grown into a man of welling pores and frequent snorts and was known as an obsessive collector of anthropological artifacts, although he himself was too weak stomached ever to travel on an explorer's ship.

"Stop." Scolded her mother. Katherine blinked. She hadn't thought she's betrayed any emotion. "You would not be so complaining if your father were here."

The mention of Mr. Bennett caused Katherine's eyes to well and she felt herself softening to her mother's cause.

"I'm sorry," Katherine answered trying to keep her voice level. She felt the dryness in her throat that always proceeded tears and willed them away. "It's just that I wonder if the accomplished Mr. Coddington will ever remember me when I have been so long away."

Mrs. Bennett sniffed as the Misses. Wetmore, who were one and three years older than Katherine, passed. "Of course he remembers you. Especially when the alternative is girls like _them_. They look as if they were dressed by the circus." Mrs. Bennett comments coldly.

Katherine was trying to think of something nice to say about Percival Coddington and missed what her mother said next. Something about someone being vulgar. Just as her mother pronounced the word, Katherine noticed her friend Elena Gilbert on the second floor mezzanine. Elena was wearing a ruffled, poppy colored gown with a low bodice and Katherine could not help but feel so proud to see her friend looking so stunning.

"I shouldn't of have dignified this ball with my presence." Mrs. Bennett went on. There was a time when she would not so much as called on the upstart Gilbert women, despite her husband's having a hunting invitation from Jonathan Gilbert once or twice, but society's opinion had moved on without her and she had recently begun acknowledging them. "The papers will report that I condone this sort of tacky display and you know what kind of headache that will give me."

"But you know it would have been a bigger scandal if we hadn't come." Katherine extended her long slender neck and gave her friend a subtle, knowing smile. How she wished she were with her instead, laughing at the poor girl whose bad luck had forced her to dance with Percival Coddington. Elena, gazing down let one darkly make-up eyelid fall –her signature slow smoldering wink- and Katherine knew that she understood her. "And anyways," Katherine added turning her attention back at her mother. "You know you never read the papers."

"Right." Her mother agreed. "I don't." then she jutted the one feature she shared with her daughter –a small dimpled nub of a chin- as Katherine offered the subtlest shrug to her best friend on the mezzanine.

They had become friends during the period of her early teens when Katherine was most interested in what it meant to be a young lady in fashion. Elena had shared that interest, though she was ignorant of the rules of the society she so desperately wanted to be a part of. Katherine, who was only just beginning to care about all those rules had cultivated as a friend anyways. She had quickly discovered that she liked being around Elena –everything seemed sharper and frizzier in the company of the young Miss. Gilbert. And soon enough, Elena had become a deft player of society's games; Katherine could think of no one better to have at her side during the evening's entertainment.

"Oh look!" Mrs. Bennett's voice rang out sharply, bringing Katherine's focus back to the ballroom floor. "Here is Mr. Coddington!"

Katherine put on a smile and turned to the inevitable fact of Percival Coddington. He attempted a bowlike gesture, his glance darted across the low cut square of her bodice. Her heart sank as she realized that he was dressed as a Sheppard, in green jodhpurs, rustic boots and colorful suspenders. They _matched._ His hair was slicked back and long at the neck and he breathed audibly through his mouth as Katherine waited for him to ask her to dance.

A moment passed and then her mother singsonged, "Well, Mr. Coddington, I've brought her to you."

"Thank you," he coughed out. Katherine could feel his eyes lingering on her uncomfortably, but she kept herself upright and smiling for she was by training, a lady. "Miss. Bennett will you dance?"

"Of course Mr. Coddington." She raised her hand so that he could take it. As his damp palm pulled her through the crowd of costumed dancers she looked back to smile reassuringly at her mother. She could at least have the gratification of seeing her pleased.

Instead she saw her mother greeting two men. Katherine recognized the first slender figure of Stanley Brennan first, who had been her father's accountant and then the imposing figure of Giuseppe Salvatore, patriarch of the old Salvatore clan, who had made a second fortune in railroads. His only son, Damon had dropped out of Harvard back in the spring and since then the daughters of Mystic Falls' elite families had talked of nothing else. At least the letter Katherine received from Agnes while she was away in Paris was full of his name and how all the girls were aching for him. He had a younger sister, Rebekah, who was a year or two younger than Bonnie, though she only wore black and was rarely seen because she disliked crowds. Katherine's impression of Damon Salvatore was still vague, thought she had seen him and heard his name spoken often enough in her younger years, usually attached to some prank or other.

Katherine's partner must have sensed her thoughts going elsewhere, because he brought her attention back with a pointed comment. "Maybe you _wanted_ to stay in the drawing room with the ladies." Percival said, bitterness surfacing his voice.

Katherine tried not to stumble on her partner's poor footwork. "No, Mr. Coddington, I am just a little tired is all." She told him, not entirely falsely. Her ship had missed her arrival date by three days; she had been home for less than twenty four hours. She barely had her land legs yet and here she was dancing. Her mother had insisted by letter that she not retain the services of her French maid, so she had been left to do her own hair and care for her clothing all by herself during the entire journey. Elena had stopped by that afternoon to teach her the new dance steps and to tell her how furious she would have been had the ship been any later and cause her best friend to be a no show on one of the most important night of her life. Then she'd gone about some new secret beau, whose identity she would reveal later to Katherine, as soon as they had a moment alone. There were simply too many servants hovering during those pre-ball hours for the naming of names to be prudent. Elena had seemed even more competitive about her looks and dress than usual because of the boy and because the ball was the debut of her family's new home, Katherine assumed. Also adding to Katherine's strain, of course, was her mother's strange behavior.

Plus, there had already been quadrilles and dinner and polite talk with several of her aunts and uncles. She had had to give the same amount of her rocky transatlantic passage several times already. And just when Katherine finally sat down with her friends for a glass of champagne and a little talk about how absolutely stunning everything was, she had been forced back into the center of activity. To dance with Percival Coddington of all people. But she kept smiling, of course. It was her habit.

"Well, what are you thinking about then?" Percival frowned and pressed his hand onto her lower back. Katherine couldn't think of anyone she would trust less to move her backwards and across a floor of exuberant, slightly tipsy people.

"Uh…" Katherine started, realizing that she had been thinking that even the drawing room was not a total respite. Truthfully, she had been just a little bit relieved to leave Agnes, even though Agnes was such a loyal friend, because the leather fringed dress she wore was ill fitting and unflatteringly tight. Katherine had been distracted with pity during their entire conversation. Agnes seemed especially next to her new glamorous Parisian friends, like an embarrassing remnant of childhood.

She focused again on Percival's animated, ugly face and tried to keep her feet going _one two three _across the floor. She thought about the evening thus far, all the hours of mindless chatter and carefully accepted compliments, all the studious attention to appearances. She recalled the calculated luxury of her time in Paris. What had she been doing, _really _doing all this time? What had _he _–the boy she had been trying so hard to forget, indeed believed she _had_ forgotten- been doing all the time she had been away? She wondered if he stopped caring for her. Already, she could feel the stunning weight of a lifetime of regret for letting him go and she knew it was enough to bury her alive.

All at once the room turned mute and violently bright. She closed her eyes and felt Percival Coddington's on her ear asking if she felt alright. Her corset which her made, Caroline, who preferred being called Care had practically sewed onto her hours earlier, felt suddenly horribly constricting. Her life, she realized, had all the charm of a steal trap.

Then as quickly the panic had come, it went. Katherine opened her eyes. The sounds of joy and giddy and indulgence came rushing back. She glanced up at the great domed ceiling glowing above them and reassured herself that it had not fallen.

"Yes, Mr. Coddington, thank you for asking." Katherine finally responded. "I'm not sure what came over me."

**A/N: **oohhh who's the mystery man? Guess. Yes I know this chapter wasn't very exciting, but it's only the beginning it'll get better as it goes on. I am also aware that Katherine and Elena have each other's personality. I made it like that, you'll understand further along. Remember: Review Review Rview !


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter two**

**Disclaimer: **This is a retelling of the story of The Luxe by Anna Gobberson, using the characters and locations of Vampire Diaries, that belongs to L.J Smith. In other words; I own NOTHING.

_Cloakroom one o'clock_

_BB_

Bonnie Bennett saw her mother ascend the twisted marble staircase on the far side of the ballroom, supported by some big older fellow whom she felt sure she knew. Their family friend and accountant, Stanley Brennan, trailed behind. Just before they moved out of view and toward some surely lavished second story smoking room, Mrs. Bennett looked back, caught Bonnie's eye, and gave her an admonishing glance. Bonnie cursed herself for being spotted and then briefly considered staying in the grand central ballroom to patiently wait for one of her cousins to ask her to dance. But patience was not in Bonnie Bennett's nature.

Besides, she had been so proud of her cunning writing the little invitation during a freshening up in the ladies' dressing room earlier in the evening. She then slipped it to the architect Webster Youngham's assistant who was stationed near the arched entryway in order to explain the many architectural references that had been incorporated into the Gilbert family's new home. She had pushed her way through the crowd, curtsied, clasped his hand, and palmed him the note. "You truly are an artist Mr. Youngham." She said, knowing full well that Mr. Youngham was already drunk on martinis and lounging in one of the card rooms upstairs.

"But I'm not Mr. Youngham," he told her, looking adorably confused. As soon as she saw that look, Bonnie knew that she'd hooked him. "I'm Ben Miller, his assistant."

"Nevertheless." She winked before disappearing back into the crowd. Ben had broad shoulders and dreamy gray eyes, and if he was just an assistant he seemed like someone who had gone places and done things. She hadn't seen anyone nearly so nice looking in the intervening hour.

So Bonnie picked up her skirt and moved quickly between the enormous planters and the wall. She looked behind her once before leaving the ballroom to make sure no one was watching and then slipped into the cloakroom. It was massive and overly ornamented, Bonnie thought, especially for a room that was chiefly occupied by coats. It didn't matter to _them_ that the room was Moorish-themed with a colorful mosaic floor and antiqued displayed in the turret shaped alcoves carved from the walls.

Bonnie looked around her, trying to locate her French lieutenant's coat. She had come dressed as her heroine of her favorite novel, _Trilby_, who appears for a first time on a break from her job as an artist's model in a petticoat, and slippers, and a solder's coat. Bonnie had not been allowed to wear a petticoat without a skirt, but she had the thrill of having gotten away with something, just wearing the rest of the costume at all. Her mother had even had a shepardess costume made for her so that she would match her older sister, Katherine, which would have been hideous in addition to humiliating. Instead here she was in a satisfyingly bohemian red and white striped skirt and a simple white cotton bodice that she had ripped in a few places on the sly. No one got it of course; all the other girls her age were conformists at heart and seemed to have dressed up as themselves, only with more powder and artificially narrowed waists.

She was just beginning to wonder if one of the servants hadn't mistaken a perfectly shabby gray coat for her own, when she was startled by one single clang from the clock in the corner she gasped surprised and stepped back –a little unsteadily from all the champagne she had been sneaking- and when she did she felt the chest of a man and a pair of hands on her hips. Her whole body rushed from the adrenaline.

"Oh hello," she tried to make her voice flat and indifferent, even though this was by far the most exciting thing to happen to her all evening.

"Hello." Ben's mouth was very close to her ear.

Bonnie turned slowly and met his eyes. "I hope you brought the cigarettes." She said, trying not to smile too much.

Ben had short straight eyebrows set far apart, which made his eyes look open and earnest. "I didn't think ladies of your class were allowed to smoke."

Bonnie affected a pout. "So you didn't bring ciggies?"

He paused, his eyes lingering on her in a way that made her feel not at all like a lady. "Oh no, I brought them. It's just that I'm not sure I should give you one or not…" Bonnie noticed a little mischief in his eye, and concluded that it must be the glimmer of a kindred spirit.

"What do I have to do to convince you?" she asked, turning her head jauntily.

"This is serious, what you are asking me to do." He replied, with an air of put on gravity. Then he laughed. Bonnie liked the sound of it. "You're pretty." He told her smiling unabashedly, now.

Bonnie and her sister could not have shared more physical characteristics and looked less alike. Like Katherine, she had the small features and round mouth of the Bennett woman, although she still had the softness of her baby fat. She liked to think that her dark hair added a certain mystery, although it was in truth a sort of medium brown and untamable. Her eyes were always described as _vivid. _And of course she and her sister had e same chin, -her mother's-. She hated her chin. "Oh I'm all right." She answered him, glowing with false modesty.

"Much better than all right." He continued to observe her as he pulled a cigarette out of his breast pocket. He lit one and handed it to her.

Bonnie took a drag and tried not to cough. She loved smoking –or the idea of smoking- but it was hard to practice with her mother and the staff always watching her. She was pulling it off though; at least she thought she was, exhaling little puffs into the air. It felt right, especially with all the metallic and turquoise detail in the room suggesting some hazy far off locale. She raised an eyebrow, wondering how Ben Miller was going to make his move. "So if you're an architect, does that mean you're an artist?"

"Depends on whom you ask," he replied lightly. "Some of us like to think that we make the most monumental and lasting kind of art."

"That's very nice." Bonnie said blithely. "Because you see, I have been trying to find a real artist."

"Whatever for?" He asked, leaning into the coats and putting his cigarette to his mouth.

"Well, to kiss, of course." Bonnie drew her breath in after she spoke. Even she was occasionally surprised by the audacious things that came out of her mouth.

Ben exhaled thoughtfully; the smoky sweet smell of tobacco surrounded them. For a moment, Bonnie felt like she could have been a million miles off in a tent hidden away in some shack in Tunis or Marrakech, arranging for secret deals in magic powders.

"It occurs to me," Ben started, the hard edges of his southern voice reminding her that she was still in Mystic Falls on a street as familiar as Fifth Avenue, no less. "That you are being a very naughty girl."

"You think so?" Bonnie asked, dragging on her cigarette amusedly. She too, sank into the soft wall of coats, moving closer to Ben.

"Well how often, do young ladies of your class, meet strange older men in closets with all of society a few heartbeats away?"

"What makes you think that there us any comparison between me and the girls of _my class_?" bonnie pronounced the last two words in disgust. The girls in her class were slaves to the rules, going about life –if you could call it that- like bloodless mannequins. "I told you I was looking for an artist," she went on impatiently. "So if you're going to go on thinking conventionally and just like everyone else, I way as well leave."

Ben smiled and dropped his cigarette onto the black and white marble tiled floor. He stepped on it before shooing it to the corner with his toe. He looked very old to Bonnie all of a sudden, even though he couldn't have been more than twenty. Then he was moving towards her fast. As soon as their lips touched, she knew there wasn't going to be any magic. This was not the heart stopping touch that she had been waiting for all evening, and it didn't help especially that his style of kissing, was mashing one face against another. Her whole body went slack with the disappointment.

Bonnie kissed him back, just to make sure her instinct was correct, but she had been kissed before and she knew what it felt like when it was good. Ben ranked far below Luka Marten, whom she had kissed several times in Saratoga over the summer, and only slightly better than her first kiss, at age thirteen, which had been so acrid an affair that she had vanished the boy's identity from even her own memory.

Bonnie was finally accepting the fact that Ben Miller, architect assistant, was not the kind of artist she was looking for when the door creaked and a foot sounded at the threshold.

"Miss. Bonnie…?" Said a male voice more hurt than shocked.

Bonnie felt Ben's grip tighten momentarily as they turned toward the door. Bonnie noticed Stanley Bennan's long tired face immediately. He was on twenty six –he had taken over from his father as Mr. Bennett's accountant- but his constant anxiety gave him a prematurely aged appearance.

"Your mother. She sent me to check on you." He said haltingly. "To make sure you weren't getting into trouble.

Ben let go of Bonnie's waist and stepped back. He didn't look especially pleased by Brennan's entrance but he kept quiet. Bonnie felt freer instantly, rejoicing as she was in having Ben's rough chin off her face.

"Thank you Brennan." She said. "Would you like to accompany me back to the ballroom?"

Brennan stepped forward cautiously, reaching towards the rips that Bonnie put in her costume. They had widened during the poor excuse of a tryst.

"Oh stop its fine." She lifted an arm for him to take. "Thank you for explaining the Islamic references in the Jonathan Gilbert's coatroom to me. I will remember it always."

She looked back once, and imagined that the grimace on Ben's face was the beginning of his life of a briefly broken man by a disappointment. It was her fate to leave such causalities in her wake, she thought as she and Brennan exited and walked in the direction of the main ballroom.

"I won't tell your mother," Brennan whispered as their shoes shuffled along the gleaming marble corridor. "Though I feel, as you late father's friend that I should remind you that that kind of behavior could be your ruin."

"I'm not afraid." Bonnie said gaily.

"You're like my little sister almost, and it is my responsibility to look after you. Your mother thinks so anyways." He stopped walking as if to convey his seriousness. "If she found out what you have been up to and that I knew about it that would be the end of both of us."

"Well, that is very true." Bonnie paused next to him. They could already hear the shouting and music from the ballroom, and in a moment they would be swept back into the bright lights. Bonnie had turned the corners of her mouth down in a fake pout, even while her eyes shone with flirtation. "But would that really be so bad?"

Then she laughed, grabbed Brennan's hand, and pulled him back into the center of things. She was searching for an inexpressible _something_, and she wasn't about to let one sour little kiss slow her down.

**A/N: Tada! Yes I know now Bonnie is acting like Katherine, but for good reason. I always think Bonnie as the rebellious stubborn type and I always found Katherine the nice little girl before turning. Now tell me what you think.**

**Review!**


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter Two**

**Disclaimer: **This is a retelling of the story of The Luxe by Anna Godberson, using the characters and locations of Vampire Diaries, that belongs to L.J Smith. In other words; I own NOTHING.

_Not sure if I can make it to your party tonight._

_My apologies if that is the case._

_-DS_

"Little Bo Peep. That's too perfect for Katherine." Elena Gilbert says, as she said as she nearly said everything with a quarter ounce of venom.

"Well, at least she didn't forget her humble American origins while she was slumming with the frenchies." Her friend Jeremy Phillips Buck replied. "And at least she didn't go bland marquis et marquis like everyone else." He added with a sniff.

Elena gave a careless shrug. if he wanted to praise Katherine Bennett, whom she had long ago singled out as her principal rival, and thus her only possible best friend, and who was now circling the polo field sized dance floor with that toad Percival Coddington, it was fine with her. She was feeling entirely better how very impressed everyone was by her family's new house and hosting style. And of course, by her.

There had been a dark moment earlier, when the messenger arrived with the note. She had just returned from the Bennetts' where she had gone to welcome Katherine back and chastise her for nearly missing the party. Her heart had clenched, reading the careless missive and then she had flown into a rage that -she could admit this now- had not been especially fair to the maids attending to her before the party. It was not so much that she feared the writer of the note would not come to love her –how could any boy hold out really- but that this particular boy might miss this particular party. After all, what better place for him to realize she was truly the center of the universe, and that keeping their relationship a secret was a colossal waste?

Now, observing her family's ballroom from the mezzanine, her torso clenched between her flamenco dancer's red flounces to a perfect eighteen inches, she felt supremely confident that he would come. It was the evening of the Jonathan Gilbert's ball, the evening where they reached their apotheosis as a top drawer family –there was simply no place else to be- she was certain he would arrive shortly. Well, almost certain. Elena rested a confident hand on her hip even as she clenched and unclenched her fist around the note in her other hand.

"Would you look at Katherine, holding herself so high and mighty." Elena said. The dozens of delicate yellow gold bangles lining her forearm jingled.

Jeremy drew himself up to his full height and rested his hand on his rotund belly, which went undisguised by his jester outfit. "I think she is trying to keep out of the way of Percival's breath."

Then they laughed, as the always laughed: mouth closed and through their noses. Elena and Katherine hadn't really become friends until they shared a French tutor in their early teens. (Later Elena heard that this arrangement had been thought up by Mr. Bennett to perturb Mrs. Bennett, and had never forgotten the slightest). He had been an adorable and lanky fellow whom Katherine had enjoyed making blush by asking him for instance, to explain the difference between _décolletage_ and _décolleté_. It was comical what lengths Katherine seemed to go to these days to prove what a proper little miss she was. Elena never worried much about anything, especially whether she was perceived as a lady which was well and good, since Elena was something less than a lady, at least from the point of view of members of the old Dutch families like Katherine's mother, who nonetheless had been enjoying the lavishness of the Gilbert's ballroom all evening. A ballroom, Elena couldn't help but thinking, far more vast and sparkling than the Bennett's ballroom. The Bennett's lived in a rather old and rather plain sort of mansion in Gramercy Park with a staid brown face and the rooms all in a neat straight row. And that wasn't an even fashionable part of town anymore.

Elena might have felt bad for Katherine that she still lived in such a backwater while the Gilbert family had moved on to Fifth Avenue uptown, with its strip of brand new residents, except that she knew very well that Katherine's mother was always talking about the Gilbert's, and how they were a made up family, it was true that the Gilbert fortune when Elena's grandfather, Odin Himont Jr., gave up his modest tailoring business in Maryland, and began selling cotton blankets to the union army for the price of wool. But ever since Granddad had moved to Mystic Falls, changed his name and bought a Washington square town house from a bankrupt branch of the Ryder family, the Gilbert clan had been entrenched in Mystic Falls society.

Now they'd left Washington square behind forever and resituated themselves in the only private home in Mystic Falls with three elevator banks and a basement swimming pool. They had arrived, and they had the mansion to prove it, or a palazzo as her mother constantly and irritatingly referred to it,

"Good work tonight, Jer." Elena said, her full lips breaking into a smile of enormous pride. In parlor chatter, Elena's beauty was occasionally derided as being all lips, but the jabbing hens who said so were certainly in error. Elena's lips were no more striking than her eyes, which were wide and brown and capable of welling with innocence or scorn in equal measure.

"Only for you." He replied in his nasally faux-British accent. Jeremy had something of a case of Anglo mania and it had lately spread to his diction.

Since Jeremy was only half acknowledged by the Buck clan as one of their own, he was obliged to work for a living and had made himself indispensible to hostesses like Mrs. Gilbert. He always knew where to get the freshest flowers and where to find the most handsome young men who were willing to dance and fun to dance with, even if they weren't exactly marriageable. He knew how to shriek at the cooks so that the meat would come out just done enough. Jeremy's shriek was not pretty, but his parties always were.

"I have to say," Jeremy went on drolly. "Everyone does look their best this evening. It wasn't all in vain. I mean the jewels alone. You could buy this whole town with those jewels."

"Yes." Elena agreed. "Though it never fails to shock me how people could dump a trainload of baubles over some piece of hide."

"Oh, that's just Agnes you're talking about, and she barley has any baubles. Anyway, I think she's supposed to be Annie Oakley, and I believe if you queried her dressmaker he would say the getup was _suede_."

"Hah. You know very well that Agnes doesn't have a dressmaker, Buckie." She smirked. "And Luka Martin as a matador? Please." She turned to her friend, one dark eyebrow high.

"Now, now. It's not every man who could look dignified in tights."

"Oh look, there's Klaus Cutting!" Elena surveyed the survey of costumes. Klaus with his blond hair and sparkly eyes, and inherited shipping fortune, was just the kind of boy Elena had been flirting with at balls since she'd come into society two years ago. Klaus had a crush on Katherine Bennett, which was the real reason Elena always made a point of dancing with him. She watched as the young women with their great starched skirts and puffed sleeves frocked to Klaus, who bowed gallantly and went about kissing each of their gloved hands.

"Klaus looks yummy." Jeremy let one hand float up to his chin. "He chose French courtier like everybody else, but he did do it well."

"Well enough," Elena replied nonchalantly, for wherever Klaus went there was usually a certain someone even better just behind. She snapped her fingers at one of the passing waiters, balled up the note she received earlier in the day, and dropped it into her empty champagne glass. She places her glass on his tray without meeting his eyes and then helped herself to two more flutes.

That was when Damon Salvatore strode through the arched entryway at the far end of the ballroom and the whole world seemed to faint just a little bit. Elena kept herself upright even as her heart to beat triumphantly and her face tingles in anticipation. Even among the dashing and rich, Damon Salvatore stood out for being so beautiful and so slippery all at once. He came to his friend Klaus's side and Elena rolled her eyes as he began kissing the flurry of gloved hands as well.

Damon always looked in good humor and good health, which was due in part to his penchant for outdoor sports and in part to the drink that was his constant accessory, and even across the largest private ballroom in Mystic Falls the tanned perfection of his skin was evident. He had the shoulders of a general and the cheekbones of a born aristocrat, and his mouth was often fixed in an expression of mild mockery. Like Katherine Bennett, Damon was the descendant of one of Mystic Falls' great families, but he was much, much less concerned with being _good._

"Those girls are embarrassing themselves." Elena remarked of her cousins and friends below. She ran her fingers along the middle of her scalp and drawn her hair down to the nape of her neck, framing her perfect oval face. Intricate silver filigreed combs fanned out behind her head. "I think I'm going to save them." She added as though the thought had just occurred to her.

Then she gathered up the yards of red crepe de chine covering her legs and began to glide toward the curving marble staircase.

"Buckie," She called, a few steps down the stairway, she turned to meet his eyes with a look of particular intensity."That's the man I'm going to marry."

Jeremy raised his champagne flute and Elena beamed with her declaration. How could she fall when she had someone as wily as JPB on her side? Elena turned back down the stairs and in a few moments she was standing on the main floor of her ballroom. A reverential hush settled on the room as the faces in the crowd turned towards her in a wave. Amongst all the white satin and powdered wigs, her red dress made her stand out even more than usual. She cut through the group of girls she had pronounced fools and reached Damon Salvatore in a few breathless moments.

"Who let you in?" she greeted him without a smile. She placed her fist on her hip, causing the gold gypsy style bracelets to clatter down her wrist. "_You're_ not wearing a costume. And it said very clearly on your invitation that this was to be a costume ball."

Damon turned towards her with a face of casual amusement, not even bothering with a faux self conscious examination of his black tails and trousers. "Have I done wrong Miss. Gilbert? See I don't have time to read my mail anymore, but a little bird told me you would be having a party tonight…"

It was whispered among the women of Mystic Falls that Damon always had the band paid off in advance because they frequently struck up a waltz just precisely when he needed to end a conversation. The band begun playing now, and Damon gave a gentle nod in Elena's direction. She could not stop the corner of her mouth from twitching smile like, for a moment he kept his intense gaze fixed on her as he began walking her backwards into the room until they were waltzing.

For a moment the crowd just stared, dazzled by the lightness of the couple moving across the floor. But Elena was very good at arousing jealousy, and her cousins and friends were not very good at standing still when they were jealous. Soon other less bright couples began dancing too, so that the gleaming pattern of the marble floor was blotted out by the bright swinging skirts of the girls and the nimble black feet of their partners.

There was plenty of eyes still on the flamenco dancer and the dandy of tails; Elena knew how much she was watched, so she spoke quietly as they moved. "Why did you send me that note?" she asked, tilting her head slightly as they turned.

"I like teasing you," He answered. "This way I'd know you'd be especially grateful to see me."

Elena considered this for a moment, but there was something in his lively blue eyes that told her he was lying, just a bit. "You were someplace else before you came here, weren't you?"

"Now, what would make you think a thing like that?" he replied with unwavering amusement. "I've been looking for this persises moment all day."

"You lie very well," She told him. "But I knew you wouldn't stay away."

Damon stared at her carelessly, and did not answer. He just pressed his hand into her skirt, somewhat lower than the small of her back and kept moving her through the crowd. She felt in that moment as though they were a known item and that all those lesser girls were already crying into their hankies at the thought of Damon Salvatore being married. The music seemed to be playing triumphantly and just for her. She could have gone on for her forever she might have too, had not the large whiskery figure of Damon's father appeared over his shoulder and pulled him out of the dance.

"Pardon me, Miss. Gilbert." The elder Mr. Salvatore said in a voice that was level but devoid of any apology. The rest of the dancers kept moving but Elena found herself horribly stalled in the center of everything. Her great performance curtailed by this large odious parental presence. She felt a fit coming on but somehow managed to contain it. The other dancers were pretending not to notice what was going on, but they were all terrible fakers. Elena wondered if Katherine was out there watching. She had wanted to reveal her secret relationship to her friend with maximum drama, and this exchange wasn't helping anything. "I'm going to have to borrow Damon for the rest of the night. It's quite urgent, and we must leave immediately, I'm afraid."

Instinct made Elena smile even through her misery and she tipped her hat. "Of course." She answered. Then she watched alone from the middle of that epic room, as her future husband disappeared amongst all the ordinary bodies. Elena knew despite the still dancing masses that for her, the party was over.

**A/N:** So, that was the third chapter tell me what you think.

And don't forget: Review!


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter 4**

**Disclaimer: **This is a retelling of the story of The Luxe by Anna Godberson, using the characters and locations of Vampire Diaries, that belongs to L.J Smith. In other words; I own NOTHING.

_This is to certify that I, Giuseppe Salvatore do leave all my worldly possessions, as itemized below, including all holdings related to business, real estate and personal property to_ __

Damon Salvatore pretended to study the piece of paper for another moment and did what he always did when he found something too serious or too boring to comprehend. He spread his long thin lips back from his perfectly white teeth and laughed.

"Awful morbid, did." He said. "We left the party for this?"

His father stared back at him, large and unsmiling in his black suit and thick dark muttonchops. Giuseppe Salvatore had small eyes in intimidation and dyed his hair an inky black out of vanity. Because of his frequent turns to rage, his skin was a patchy red, and his mustache curled down to his pink chin. But one could see, under all that, the fine aristocratic features that he had bequeathed to his son.

"Everything is a party to you," His father finally said in reply. Damon saw the father he knew best emerge no –the full, unpleasant personality Mr. Salvatore reserved for when he was in his own house or office. Damon had been raised by his governesses, and so his father had always seemed a distant and awesome figure charging about the house while a fleeting of underlings made awkward, obsequious gestures in the vain attempts to please him.

Damon pushed the sheet of paper back across the polished walnut pedestal table towards his father and stepfather, Isabelle, and hoped he wouldn't be bothered about it again for the rest of the evening. Isabelle smiled apologetically at him and gave him a surreptitious little roll of his eyes. She was twenty five, only five years older than Damon himself, and they had often been dance partners before her marriage to the most powerful of the Salvatore men. It was almost strange to see her in his own house, she stilled looked like Isabelle De Ford, who was always good for a flirt and a laugh. It might have been all about money, but Damon still felt secret respect toward the old man for winning her.

"You shouldn't be so hard on Damon," She said in a high girlish voice and brushed a dark curl away from her face.

"Shut up," His father replied in his deep rasp, without so much as turning to look at her. Isabelle made a frowning face and continued playing with her hair. "Get those silly looks off your faces, both of you. Damon, pour yourself a drink."

Damon did not like to look overly obedient to his father, and they avoided each other enough that indeed he rarely had the opportunity. But there was about his father, the rangy discriminating air of all extraordinary powerful men, and there was a part of Damon that craved his attention, that longed for the man to notice his actions and approve. At this particular moment, however, he chose to listen to his father because what he most wanted in the world was a drink. He crossed the room and poured himself bourbon from one of the cut glass decanters on the side table.

The room was dark and heavy with the cigar smoke that attended all his father's dealings. The walls and ceiling were of ornate carved wood –the virtuoso Italian craftsmanship so familiar to Damon that he barely noticed it anymore. So this was the sort of place where business got done, Damon mused with a touch of wonder. His life was so absolutely crammed with play that the serious mood of this room felt like a foreign territory. Earlier he had dined at the Grill on forty Fourth Street, and then there had been an interlude at one of those downtown saloons where one could wear rags and dance with working girls and then off to Elena's grand fete. He got a little preserve thrill from being slightly tipsy in the mist of his father's serious décor.

The elder Salvatore shifted in his seat. The young wife yawned. "So tell me about you and Miss. Gilbert." Damon's father said abruptly.

Damon sniffed his drink and studied himself in the mirror over the bar. He had the smooth chin and slender features of a man of leisure, and his dark hair was pomaded to the right. "Elena?" He repeated thoughtfully. Though he had little or no desire to discuss his romantic entanglements with his father, it was a subject mildly preferable to family wills.

"Yes," His father urged him on.

"Everyone thinks she is one the greatest beauties of her generation." Damon thought of Elena with her gigantic eyes and dramatic dress, which seemed calculated to frighten people as much as to seduce them. He knew from personal experience that Elena was frightening –but then he knew how to enjoy her. He wished he were back at the party, moving her exquisite body across the dance floor.

"And you?" His father went on. "What do you think?"

"I very much enjoy her company." Damon took a sip of bourbon and savored the burning tingle against his lips.

"So you want to… marry her?" his father asked leadingly.

Damon couldn't help a little snort at that. He caught Isabelle staring at him and he knew she was now thinking not like a stepmother, but like all the other girls in Mystic Falls, obsessing about how and when Damon Salvatore would marry. He lit his cigarette and shook his head. "I haven't met a girl I could think about so seriously, sir. As you have often pointed out, I am not serious about much."

"Then Elena is not someone you could see as your wife," his father confirmed leveling his fierce eyes at Damon.

Damon shrugged, remembering last April when Elena had been staying at the Fifth Avenue hotel, her family had moved out of their old house on Washington Street and the new one was not yet completed. Even though he hardly knew her, she's invited him up to her suite she had all to herself and welcomed him in nothing more than stockings and a shirtwaist. "No dad, I don't think so."

"But the way you were dancing…" he paused. "Never mind. If you don't want to marry her that's good. _Very good_." He clapped, stood, and went around the table to tower over Damon. "Now who do you think would be a good wife?"

"For me?" Damon asked, managing to keep his face straight.

"Yes you, good for nothing boulevardier." His father spat out, his momentary good humor evaporating quickly. The famous Salvatore rage was one parental touch that Damon had not been deprived of in his childhood, and it had arisen at everything from broken toys to bad manners. Giuseppe Salvatore sat down noisily in the baby soft leather club chair next to Damon. "You don't think I'm just idly curious about your paramours, do you?"

"No, sir," Damon replied, blinking his dark lashes at his father. "I do not."

"Then you're smarter than I give you credit for."

"Thank you, sir." Damon said, meaning it. He wished that his voice wouldn't get so small at times like these.

"Damon, I find your louche lifestyle personally offensive." His father stood again, pushing the club chair backwards across the parquet floor and began circling the table. "And I am not the only one."

"I'm sorry for that dad, but it's my lifestyle, not yours." Damon replied. He had regained his voice and was forcing himself to keep his gaze steadily in his father's direction. "Or anybody else's."

"Possible, but doubtful." His father went on "Since it is my money –inherited yes but multiplied many times over by my hard work- that has allowed your lifestyle."

"Are you threatening me with poverty?" Damon asked, glancing at the will as he lit a new cigarette with the old one. He tried to look carless as he exhaled, but even saying the word poverty gave him an unpleasant feeling in his stomach. The word had a sick lilt to it, he had always thought. His first semester as Harvard he had shared a suite with a scholarship student named Timothy Mayfield –his father's idea of character building, Damon later discovered. Timothy's father clerked a twelve four hour days at a bank to pay his son's tuition, and Damon liked him, who knew all the best watering holes in Cambridge. But it was the first time Damon had ever really thought about doing that soul crushing thing called working, and the realization still haunted him.

"Not exactly. Poverty does not become a Salvatore." His father finally answered. "I am here to suggest an alternative course. One, I think, you will find more palatable than an empty bank account," He went on, lowering his head and staring into his son's eyes. "Marriage."

"You want me to _marry_?" Damon asked fighting back a laugh. There was no one less marriageable in all of Mystic Falls and even those underpaid society columnists knew _that_. He tried to picture a girl with whom he would actually want to trip across the lawn of Newport or the decks of European luxury liners forever, but the power of his imagination failed him. "You can't be serious."

"I most certainly am." His father glared at him.

"Oh." Damon shook his head, hoping to appear to be considering his father's proposal. "There would have to be a long search of course, to find a girl worthy of becoming a Mrs. Salvatore…" he offered.

"Shut up Damon." His father wheeled back around the room and put his large hands on his young wife's shoulders. She smiled uncomfortably. "You see, I already have someone in mind."

"_What?_" Damon said his cool beginning to evaporate.

"Someone with class and sophistication and good family breeding. Someone whim the press likes and will embrace as your bride. As a _Mrs. Salvatore_, Damon. Someone who will come across as a conduit of civility and culture. I am thinking of-"

"Why do you care?" Damon interrupted. He was fully mad now and standing. Isabelle made a little gasping noise when she saw the two Salvatore men facing each other down.

"Why do I care?" his father roared, pacing around the table. "Why do I care? Because I have ambitions Damon, unlike you. You don't seem to understand that every move you make is reported in the society pages. And the people I care about read those pages, however silly they are, and they talk. You make us all look ridiculous, Damon. With your dropping out of college and your running around town… Everytime you open your mouth, you tarnish the family name."

"Doesn't answer my question." He shot back. His father with his explosive temper and famous love of money would seem to have quite satisfied a few ambitions already. He had built a railroad company from scratch and made it hugely profitable, had treated the tenements built on his family's ancestral lands like his own personal mints and had married two society beings and buried one. "I really don't get it dad." Damon said. "What do you _want?_"

Isabelle's small pointed elbows came excitedly to the table. "Giuseppe wants to run for office!" she blurted.

"What?" Damon's face puckered. Unable to disguise his incredibility. "What office?"

His father looked almost embarrassed by the revelation, and it quieted the tension in the room. "I've been talking to my friend from Albany and he wagered me that…" Mr. Salvatore trailed off and then shrugged his shoulders. Damon knew that his father was a longtime friend and rival of Governor Roosevelt's and he nodded for him to continue. "I admire the man's call to public service," Giuseppe enunciated, his voice growing warm and stately. "Who says the noble class should not be involved in politics? It is our noblesse oblige. Man is nothing if he cannot rule his world in his time and leave it better off when he departs for-"

"You don't have to give _me_ the speech." Damon interrupted, rolling his eyes. He was infuriated by this stroke of bad luck. "What office do you want anyways?"

"Mayor first, and then-"his father started.

"And then who knows!" Isabelle broke in. "If he becomes president, _I _will be the first lady."

"Well, congratulations, sir." Damon sat back down dejectedly.

"So there will be no embarrassing me anymore. No more tales of your wildness in the papers. No more bad publicity." The elder Salvatore pronounced. "Now you see why you must marry a lady. Not a Elena. A girl with morals whom the voters like. A girl who will make you look respectable. A girl…" Damon watched his father as he leaned against the table and pretended to have an idea. He raised his eyebrow at Isabelle. "A girl like Katherine Bennett, say."

"What?" Damon snapped. He knew the older Bennett girl, of course, although he hadn't had a conversation with her since before he went to Harvard and she had been very young and gangly then. She was impeccably beautiful, it was true, with her chocolate brown hair and small round mouth, but she was obviously one of _them._ She was a rule follower, a tea sipper, a sender of embossed thank you cards. "Katherine Bennett is all manners."

"Exactly," His father pounded his fist on the table, which caused the gold liquid in Damon's snifter to slosh back and forth.

Damon couldn't speak, but he knew his face was twisted with outrage and disbelief. His father could not have suggested a poorer match. What he had prescribed for his son was nothing short of a prison sentence. He could feel the life of quiet gentility already rolling out before him, like the endless manicured lawns on which so many narcoleptic garden parties had been held by the matrons in his class, in Tuxedo Park and Newport, Lockwood Estate and all those other places.

"Damon," His father said warningly. He snatched up the piece of paper and waved it in the air. "I know what you are thinking, and you should stop it. Now. I want you married and respectable, you will have to do away Elena. I am giving you an opportunity here Damon." He paused. "But gods help me, if you cross me, I'll see that every damn picture frame goes to Isabelle. I will throw you out and it will be very swift, and very, _very_ public."

The thought of a brown future of threadbare clothing and rotting teeth made Damon feel suddenly, horribly sober, and his eyes drifted to the bottles crowded together on the sideboard. For a moment, he wished he could go back to Harvard, all the reading and lectures so so pointless when he was there, but he saw now how college might have been a way for him to carve his own path, to guard against these threats of pennilessness. It was too late for that now.

His bad behavior and pathetic marks ensured that, without his father's intervention, he would never have a place there again. Damon stared into the silent amber bottles and knew that the only route of independence left to him was through the quiet, deathlike boredom of a life with Katherine Bennett.

**A/N: **Ohhh, Damon into a forced marriage? Poor him. Tell me what you think. That means Review!

Also, if you want to read a really good story about Bamon read 'This Is War' by Cynner. It was EPIC! I don't know how to explain it but READ IT. You won't be disappointed.


	6. Chapter 6

**Chapter Five**

**Disclaimer: **This is a retelling of the story of The Luxe by Anna Gobberson, using the characters and locations of Vampire Diaries, that belongs to L.J Smith. In other words; I own NOTHING.

_The ideal ladies' maid will be awake before her mistress, with warm water for washing the face, and will not go to sleep until she has undressed her mistress for bed. She may require a nap during the day, when her mistress does not need her._

_-Van Kamp's Guide To Housekeeping For Ladies Of High Society, 1864 EDITION_

Caroline Forbes rearranged her elbows on the still and stared out into the tranquil darkness surrounding Gramercy Park. She had been sitting this way for many hours, in the bedroom where she had dressed the elder of the Misses Bennett in layers of chemise, poplin, whalebone, and steel earlier that evening. Miss Bennett –no longer Katty as she had been called in childhood, or Kat, as she let her sister call her, but Miss Bennett, the junior lady of the house. Caroline was not looking forward to her return. Katherine had been away for so many months that her personal maid had almost forgotten what it felt like to serve. But from the very moment that morning when Katherine had returned to the house, she had gone about reminding Caroline precisely what was expected of her.

She scrunched up her shoulders and sighed as she dropped them. She was not like her older sister, Lexi, an altogether softer person, content to read the latest _Cite Chatter _in the narrow attic bedroom that they shared, gazing at drawings of the Worth gowns she herself would never wear. Lexi was twenty one, only four years older than her sister, but acted as though she were Caroline's mother. Since their real mother had been dead for years, in many ways she was. But Lexi was also childlike in her gratitude for every little trinket the Bennetts bestowed upon her. Caroline could not bring herself to feel the same way.

She shifted in her simple black linen dress, with its boat neck and low dowdy waist, taking in the luxury of Katherine's bedroom: the robin's egg blue wallpaper, the wide mahogany sleigh bed, the shiny silver bathtub with heated water piped through the walls, the perfume of peonies erupting from porcelain pitchers. Since Katherine had come out, she had begun to fancy herself an expert of decoration of interiors and if asked, she likely would have said that the Bennett rooms were really rather modest. Well, compared to the ridiculous mansions of fifth avenue millionaires, perhaps they were. I seemed to Caroline, sitting under the small Dutch paintings of the domestic scene in the big gold frame, that Katherine had become blind to her own extraordinary privilege.

But Caroline could not hate Katherine. Could not hate her, no matter how much she distanced herself with elaborate clothing and fine manners. Katherine has always been Caroline's model for how to act and be, a glimmer of hope that she would not always live a life so simple and plain. And it was Katherine who had convinced her, one night ten years ago, that they must go downstairs –all the way to the carriage house- to find out who was wailing in the middle of the night. Caroline had been scared, but Katherine had insisted. That was when Caroline had first come to love Stefan Keller, who was beautiful even then.

Stefan had been an orphan at the age of eight by one of those fires that blew through the tenements like they were kindling, trapping men and babies in dark closets. Stefan, who had been taken in by his father's former employers with the understanding that he would serve, even at that tender age, had wailed when he dreamed of fires. Though it didn't matter very long after that, because he stopped dreaming of those things when Caroline and Katherine became his friends.

There was a difference between them even then, of course, but they were all children and as such equally banned from the Bennetts' grown up world of dinner parties and card games. During the day they were all under the care of Caroline's mother, Liz Forbes, who had been the Bennett girls' nurse, and she never made any distinctions among her charges. She had often scolded Stefan and Katherine equally for their many schemes. Lexi was too timid to join theses pranks, and Bonnie too young. But Caroline had always hurried along with them, desperate to play a part. At night they would crawl about the darkened house giggling at those great portraits of Katherine's forefathers, sneaking sugar from the kitchen and silver buttons from the morning room. They stole old Mr. Bennett's playing cards with the pictures of ladies in undergarments on the backs and wrinkled their noses at them. They really were friends back then, before Katherine's sense of self-importance swelled and she stopped having time for her old playmates.

Caroline wasn't sure when things changed. Maybe around the time her mother died and Katherine began her lessons with Mrs. Bertrand, the finishing governess. Caroline had been almost eleven then, awkward in body and eager to find fault in everything. She didn't often like to think back on those years. Katherine. A little less than a year older than she, had become suddenly absorbed in her lessons in civility, in how to hold a teacup and when the proper time to return a call from a married female acquaintance was. Her every gesture seemed intended to convey to Caroline that they were not of the same cloth, that they were no longer friends. And now Katherine was the sort of girl Lexi read in her magazines.

For years Caroline existed quietly, and practically alone, despite attending to Katherine all day and night and sharing sleeping quarters with her sister and the other young woman on the Bennett staff. She'd been too shy to maintain her childhood friendship with Stefan without the buffer of Katherine. So she had watched him grow taller and finer looking from afar. There had been dark years for him too –she had heard stories if his drinking and fighting from the house keeper, Mrs. Faber, and had wondered what dissatisfaction lived in his heart. It was only summer–when, with Katherine gone, she was temporarily and gloriously freed from her regular duties -that was when she and Stefan became friends again. They shared cigarettes after his long days were done and jokes at the expense of Mrs. Faber. They imagined aloud what their lives would be like if they were free to do what they wished. Before, she always wondered where he always disappeared to. Now she knew that he want dangerous at all, that he spent every moment he wasn't working with a book. Books about the excesses of the leisure class, and the theory of democracy, about politics and literature, but most of all about the West and how everybody with drive could make his way over there. Now the summer was almost over, and she still hadn't found a way to tell him that she wanted to go out West too. With him. That she was in love with him.

Caroline was brought back from her thoughts of Stefan by the actual sight of him. One of the Bennetts' broughams came to a stop in front of the house, and Stefan leaped down from his perch to hush the horses and open the door for the ladies. She looked at his back, wide at the shoulders and long at the torso, with the poignant _**X**_ of black suspenders across it. Katherine came first, holing up her arm for Bonnie, who, for all her big talk, was looking rather fatigued. And then Stefan put his arm out for Mrs. Bennett, whose small black figure came quickly to the ground. Then the women walked after the other through the still night and up to the door. Caroline could hear Lexi welcoming them as Stefan walked the horses around the carriage house.

She knew Katherine would soon be advancing up the main stairs, and she felt a rebellious instinct to rise up in her. Once she arrived, Caroline would have to undress her young mistress and wouldn't be in bed until after morning's light. Just imagining the very task she had performed thousands of times but escaped for months, caused her body to flush with resentment. She pushed herself up from the sill and shuffled hurriedly out of Katherine's room and down the long carpeted hall. She reached the back servants' stairs in a few moments and then hustled down two steps at a time.

As Caroline moved towards the kitchen she could hear the Bennett women on the main stairs going up. She paused and considered whether she would be punished, and how, for abandoning her duties on Miss Bennett's first night back in Mystic Falls. But she wanted to tell Stefan about all the French airs her mistress had acquired. She wanted to see him laugh and know she had caused it. And maybe… maybe she would find a way to tell him how she felt. So she gave herself a little nod and dashed through the kitchen and out the near pantry door which Katherine had installed last fall for facilitate deliveries from the grocer.

Then she stepped lightly onto the hay covered ground of the carriage house. Stefan had been removing the equipment from the horses. It lay there on the ground in neat rows so that he could clean it before putting it away. The threadbare cotton of his blue collared shirt clung to his skin from working with those gleaming black animals. His sleeves were rolled above his elbows and his hair was damp where it hung beneath his ears.

He took a step forward and met her eyes, and then stopped as though he had realized something.

"Hey," He greeted her quietly. He looked over her shoulder toward the door, and then smiled tightly as he refocused his eyes on her. "Shouldn't you be upstairs, helping the Misses Holland?"

Caroline stood still near the door and smiled uncontrollably. She hugged herself and waited for him to invite her in like usual, but then he turned his gaze away and spoke in a very different tone from the one she had grown used to over the summer. "You know you're testing your luck, sneaking around at night. Now that Miss Kathy… I mean Miss Katherine is back. You shouldn't. You…can't."

Caroline's heart was startled in her chest and time stretched slowly in front of her. She was so confused by the way he was acting. It was as though all the closeness that had grown between them over the summer had disappeared in an instant, or had only ever existed in her imagination. She blinked, wishing that he would just look at her for a moment.

Then he did finally bring his gaze to meet hers. His face was frozen and his mouth was set and his eyes were blank. The horse nearest his shifted, prancing in place and shaking its head. A moment passed, and then Stefan reached up and quieted the large animal.

"Stefan," She said, her voice rising with an unpleasant pleading quality that she could not control. She desperately wanted him to say something familiar and encouraging, to make some kind of joke that would eclipse the awkwardness she was feeling now. "Why can't I visit with you like usual? The ladies do it during the day, with tea, but because we're who we are, we have to do it at odd hours and in-"

"Caroline," Stefan interrupted. She was jarred by the name, which he rarely used. Over the summer he had always used her childhood nickname, Caro, to address her. He looked to the ground and sighed. Then, without meeting her eyes he moved towards her. He gently took both of her hands, and for a second Caroline thought her heart might stop. But then he pushed her back towards the kitchen. "I'm sorry Caroline," he said softly as he moved her up those four wooden steps and into the house. "Not tonight. You can't be here tonight."

"But why not?" she whispered.

Stefan stared at her. His brow was tense and his eyes seemed very green and very serious. He just shook his head, like whatever he was thinking was something she wouldn't understand. "Just not tonight, all right?"

And then she was in the kitchen and the door had closed in her face. Caroline reached out for a wall in the darkness. She slid down to the floor, which smelled of cooked onions and dirt, and there she remained. She sat like that for a long time, feeling lonelier than perhaps ever. Outside, the sky began to turn from black to the darkest purple.

She was still there when the door to the servants' stairs opened, and a figure in a white silk wrap hurried across the floor. The girl was as darting and iridescent as a ghost, and she kept her head down as she moved.

She had already pushed through the door to the carriage house when Caroline realized that the girl was Miss Katherine Bennett.

**A/N: **That's chapter 5 for you, hope you liked it. Sorry it took so long. One think I would like to say is that I know this is labeled a Bamon story and so far no Bamon at all. But in a few chapters that will change. Major Bamon action but first I have to set up the plot line or whatever. So stay tuned and don't forget Review!

Thanks!


	7. Chapter 7

**Chapter 6**

**Disclaimer: **This is a retelling of the story of The Luxe by Anna Godberson, using the characters and locations of Vampire Diaries, that belongs to L.J Smith. In other words; I own NOTHING.

_Paris, August 1863_

_The summer is almost over, and I now understand my role more clearly – what it is to be a young lady of the Bennett family, and all that is expected of me. I must not always be so indulgent and careless – although I find it difficult to regret anything I have done._

_From the diary of Katherine Bennett_

Katherine, wrapper in the white silk kimono her father had bought on a trip to Japan and given to her for her sixteen birthday, hurried through the kitchen and out the back door. She was moving with the trembling determination of a desire that had been building in her all night. She had kept her head down as she stepped onto the first of four steps made of old pliant wood and then onto the stable floor.

She stood there on the soft floor, the air all around her heavy with late summer heat and motes of hay. She listened to the sounds of the horses gently shifting in their stables and felt fully awake for the first time all night. These things – the sound of the animals, the crisp and quiet night, and the sweetness of the hay – they were everything she had tried so hard not to think about while she was gone. She stepped lightly in her satin slippers, trying to keep her kimono from catching any incriminating bits of hay.

"You came," Stefan stated, though it sounded more like a question. His legs dangled off the loft where he slept, and his hair was greasy from humidity and work. He had the habit when he was nervous or annoyed, of pushing it repeatedly behind her ears. Stefan, unlike the other boys her friends lusted for, had a hooked nose from the time it was broken in a brawl, and thick expressive lips. His eyes were bright wounded blue, and he was sitting in a familiar position, it was the position of waiting. "I'd nearly given up on you," he added, the cautiousness of his phrasing masking the fear in his voice.

Looking up at Stefan, Katherine felt elated and weary at once, and she realized what a very long night it had been. The whole ball, all that shrieking laughter, all those elaborate gowns seemed like the stuff of a bright, absurd dream that had passed with the coming of morning. There had been dances with enough bachelors to make her mother happy, some of them less eligible and more charming than Percival Coddington. She had found time to catch up with Elena and they'd clasped hands and whispered appreciatively back and forth about each other's dresses. She forgotten to needle Elena about the secret affair, she had been a bad friend, she realized now, but she would make a big show of begging Elena to tell her who the unnamed beau was later. They'd agreed that the terrine was delicious, though they had been both too excited to eat any of it, and that they'd more champagne than they had meant to. But champagne, they agreed, as they always had before, was not to be resisted. It had been a very long night, but it seemed to her now that it could have ended nowhere but here.

"I'm sorry… but you know that you shouldn't be waiting," Katherine finally answered, even though she might as easily had told him that she'd thought of him every day and that their separation had been excruciating. She wanted to tell him about the far off places she has seen, how the broad avenues of Paris curved and opened onto grand vistas unimaginable in straight up and down Mystic Falls. There were many things she wanted to say, but instead she mumbles: "I wouldn't want you to count on my coming even when I might not be able-" She stopped herself when he looked away. "Please Stefan," Katherine said then, a little desperately, her chest aching at the sight of Stefan's downcast eyes. "_Please_…"

It was remarkable how quickly she adjusted from her big comfortable room upstairs to down here in the carriage house, how quickly all the rules that governed her daily life became useless and silly seeming. Of course, she had long told herself to reverse this course. In Paris, she was sometimes sure that she could, that she had outgrown Stefan, that she was now fully the lady her social position called for. But when she came off the ship and down the plank that morning, she saw him waiting with the family carriage and realized that he too, had grown up. He was somehow even handsomer than he had been before, and she knew from the way he carried himself that he was no longer the sort of boy to get into useless fights. There was purpose in his every gesture. And here she was now, stuttering and stammering, near begging him to adore her again, the way a girl in love would. That's what she was after all; a girl in love.

But all that could not stop a few stray thoughts from returning to the words that her mother had uttered just before Katherine had set out on the dance floor with Percival Coddington. _The one thing we do not have is time_. Her words hovered like an augury over Katherine's head, even now, as she stood on the stable floor.

"You were gone so long," Stefan said quietly, and shook his head in a show of despondency. Katherine looked up at him and tried to banish those words still looming like storm clouds. "And then tonight, standing out on the street, waiting for the ball to be over, not knowing what you were doing in there, who's touching you, who's-" He looked straight at her then, which made any further words unnecessary. One of the horses shifted, hooves against the hay, and neighed softly.

"Stefan I couldn't_ not_ go to the ball." She widened her eyes helplessly, wondering why he had to fight with over things she couldn't change, especially on her first night home. After all, wasn't she the one risking everything she had ever known, creeping around the house at night? Couldn't he just love her in the time they had? "I'm here now Stefan. Look at me, I'm _here_," she said softly, stepping forward. "I love you." She almost laughed because she meant it so much.

"I keep picturing you inside, dancing with those other men." Stefan fixed his grip on the wooden edge of the loft, and then went on. "Those Damon Salvatore types with their hundred dollar suits and their country houses even bigger than what they have in town…"

Katherine reached the ladder and took two steps up. The wood was soft on her soft unblemished hands, but she hardly thought of that now. She kept her eyes on Stefan's and a crescent smile on her lips. "Damon Salvatore? That cad? You must be joking." She couldn't help laughing her high, fine laugh outright now.

She didn't know where it came from, this urge to comfort and hold Stefan, but it was deep in her like fate. She didn't even know when their childhood adoration had turned into adult love, but whatever it was that pulled her to Stefan had always been there. She'd never met anyone so true, so stubbornly good. Sometimes he verged on righteous, but Katherine knew how to calm him down. She looked up at Stefan, all worn out with feeling, and knew he was ready to not be angry anymore.

Stefan lowered his eyes and pushed his hair behind her ear once again. Then he raised his face slightly and peeked at Katherine. "Are you laughing at me Katty?"

"I would never," she said seriously, rising another step on the wooden ladder.

Then he swung his legs upward and stood, his worn leather boots making the loft shake. When he reached the ladder, he bent and swooped Katherine up, so that she was folded in his arms. He smelled like horses and sweat and plain soap – it was a smell she knew and adored. "I'm so happy you're back," he whispered into her neck.

Katherine closed her eyes and said nothing. It was so rare and so good, this being touched. She hadn't known how much she'd missed it until now.

"So what kind of evening was it?" he asked, speaking low, directly into her ear as he set her down on the loft's plank wood floor. "Elegant or wild?"

She pressed her face into his chest and tried to recall the party, but all she could remember were her mother's ominous words and the strange looks she kept shooting at her daughter. Katherine considered her reply, then finally said, "Boring." Then she looked up at his big handsome face and wished she could forget the evening and who she was and what her obligations were. She had come down here because what she wanted – against all her upbringings – was to be close to him for a few hours. "I thought about you the whole time. Now, can we never talk about fancy dress parties again?"

He smiled and gently laid her down on the mattress he kept in the corner of the loft, under the wood beams where he slung his clothes to dry. Katherine untied her silk kimono. He hovered over her, holding her face in his big hands and kissing her lightly again and again. A natural smile spread unbidden across her face. "I think you do love me, Miss Bennett," he whispered.

The light of an already advanced morning streamed through one small window. A certain feeling of agitated ecstasy coursed through Katherine's comfortable body, reminding her that comfortable was not how she was supposed to be feeling at all. It was her second morning back in Mystic Falls, but she had not yet slept in her own bed.

"What are you thinking about?" Stefan whispered, propping himself up on his elbow.

"I hate that question," she said, because she was again thinking about her mother's warning and how waking up in the warm crook of Stefan's arm was the opposite of heeding her. She sat up and looked out the window onto the vegetable garden in the back. "I should go," She could hear the lack of conviction in her own voice.

"Why?" Stefan slid his hand inside her kimono and rested it above her heart. The touch made her conscious of how quickly it was beating, and that every moment she spent there made her more nervous about the goings-on in the house. Caroline, despite her strange absence the night before, would likely be arriving soon with hot chocolate and ice water to find an empty bed. Katherine forced herself to give Stefan a quick kiss on his soft lips and then push herself out of his grasp.

"You know why." She stood, wrapped her robe around her. Katherine looked down at the horses stirring in their stables below and tried to look like she was doing what she thought was right. "If my mother found out that I come here – if anyone found out – it would be the end."

"But if we moved out to Montana… or California… nobody would care what we dis. We could lie in bed all morning," he said, his voice growing warm and persuasive. "And then, when we did get up, we could go for horse rides, or whatever we wanted, and…"

Katherine had heard all this before, but she could tell that she thought about it much more in her absence. She liked it when he talked this way. He was the only boy she knew who looked into the future and tried to imagine how it would be better than the present. Stefan was the most frightening and beautiful and exacting person she had ever known. Being somewhere far away from Mystic Falls, where they could be just be any boy and any girl, was the prettiest idea she could think of. There would be no more harmful misunderstandings, because she wouldn't have to sneak around and visit him only when she knew the rest of the house was too exhausted to notice.

She turned back, half ready to entertain the fantasy, but she was silenced by what she saw: Stefan, wearing only his faded black long johns, his chest slender and strong and naked with a few errant hairs, raising himself up from the bed and onto one knee. Katherine had seen this position before. She knew what it meant.

"Maybe you should be thinking about a new kind of life…" he said softly, and then reached for her hand. Katherine snatched it away instinctively as her heartbeat regained its rapid nervous pace. She looked down at her palm and wished that her sense of priority didn't make her do things like that.

"I'll be back when I can, all right?" she forced herself not to look into Stefan's face, which she knew would be twisted with confusion. If she did, she might realize how afraid she was of losing him. She might become neglectful, off all the things a good girl like her must do.

She climbed the familiar wooden steps into the kitchen, readying herself to scale the servant's stairs to her bedroom, where she could do what the rest of the girls of her set were doing: sleeping off the first ball of the season, content in the knowledge that they could doze into the afternoon, dreaming all the while of the dresses they would wear and the boys they would dance with in the upcoming months.

"Morning Miss Bennett."

Katherine turned to see Caroline sitting in her constant black dress at the heavy, uneven table In the kitchen where the cook took her breaks. While Katherine was in Paris, her maid had grown longer and skinnier, and the freckles splattered across her nose had increased in numbers. The sight of her, looking plain and a little sullen in the early morning, caused Katherine to gasp. She could feel the sweat collecting in the small of her back, and closed her robe around her to describe the flush that was spreading to her throat. Katherine was surely beginning to panic, so she was shocked by the calmness o her throat. "I've been looking for you everywhere. I am ready for my bowl of chocolate now. And bring water also. I have been all night without it."

Then Katherine turned for the stairs. "Where were you last night anyways?" she added as she hurried out of the kitchen. She tried to tell herself that she had pulled it off. Caroline was too a sulky a girl to pay attention to Katherine's doings. And anyways, how long could she have really have been sitting there?

**A/N:** Hi guys! Sorry for taking so long, been kind of distracted. I know it was a pretty uneventful chapter but tell me what you think. Review!


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